Have you ever notice the feeling when you're listening to a certain song, your emotions might change according to that? When you're listening to a sad song, you might feel that your mood becomes slower and sadder, and you felt as if your life is from a music video. Or when you're listening to a happy song, you started to feel that you want to tap your feet, sing along, dance around, or even join a flash mob?
Music is really powerful in that sense it can alter a person's emotions just by listening to a certain type of music. A video by neuroscientist and musician, Alan Harvey, sharing his believes and studies in an interactive storytelling narrative in his TEDxPerth talk youtube video. A part of the video which really stood out to me; and I even used it as a study case presentation in my class, was the part where he showed the audience how different type of music with the same shark video clip, can change how a person perceives said clip.
Going into the video, he also explains how your brain activity responds when listening to music. A fellow neuroscientist, Andrew Price, wore an EEG headgear that allows the machine to track and record his brain activities by showing the audience the alpha waves. Harvey lets the audience see how Price's brain activity looks when a song is played a certain way and how it changes immediately when an 'unexpected' happens during the course of the song is being played.
An imaging study by Stanford University School of Medicine tested out how different people's ( nine men and eight women; all right-handed, ages 19-27, with little or no musical training) brain listening to the same music works, and from their discovery, the brain process music the same way.
To make sure it was music, not language, that the study participants' brains would be processing, Vinod Menon Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the study's senior author, used music that had no lyrics. Menon's group also excluded music that the participants knew or familiar with to eliminate the confounding effects of having some participants who had heard the musical selection before while others were hearing it for the first time. Hence they picked symphonic musical pieces by 18th-century English composer William Boyce.
After testing, the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) showed that activity levels in several regions of the brain responded similarly. In other words, it all had activity in the brain regions involved in the movement, motor plannings, attention, and the auditory cortex. These synchronized activities of the brain are not what scientists expected for music to be processed the same way as other auditory stimuli, meaning - the brain treats music differently.
Also, during peak emotional times, listening to music causes the release of dopamine in the brain striatum. Dopamine is the same neurotransmitter involved in more tangible pleasures associated with rewards such as food, drugs, and sex. The brain encourages you to keep listening to music through the release of dopamine, so basically, your brain is telling you whether you should or should not listen to music at this moment.
How fascinating is it?
Reference
What Happens To Your Brain When You Listen To Music?
Music is really powerful in that sense it can alter a person's emotions just by listening to a certain type of music. A video by neuroscientist and musician, Alan Harvey, sharing his believes and studies in an interactive storytelling narrative in his TEDxPerth talk youtube video. A part of the video which really stood out to me; and I even used it as a study case presentation in my class, was the part where he showed the audience how different type of music with the same shark video clip, can change how a person perceives said clip.
Going into the video, he also explains how your brain activity responds when listening to music. A fellow neuroscientist, Andrew Price, wore an EEG headgear that allows the machine to track and record his brain activities by showing the audience the alpha waves. Harvey lets the audience see how Price's brain activity looks when a song is played a certain way and how it changes immediately when an 'unexpected' happens during the course of the song is being played.
An imaging study by Stanford University School of Medicine tested out how different people's ( nine men and eight women; all right-handed, ages 19-27, with little or no musical training) brain listening to the same music works, and from their discovery, the brain process music the same way.
To make sure it was music, not language, that the study participants' brains would be processing, Vinod Menon Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the study's senior author, used music that had no lyrics. Menon's group also excluded music that the participants knew or familiar with to eliminate the confounding effects of having some participants who had heard the musical selection before while others were hearing it for the first time. Hence they picked symphonic musical pieces by 18th-century English composer William Boyce.
After testing, the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) showed that activity levels in several regions of the brain responded similarly. In other words, it all had activity in the brain regions involved in the movement, motor plannings, attention, and the auditory cortex. These synchronized activities of the brain are not what scientists expected for music to be processed the same way as other auditory stimuli, meaning - the brain treats music differently.
Also, during peak emotional times, listening to music causes the release of dopamine in the brain striatum. Dopamine is the same neurotransmitter involved in more tangible pleasures associated with rewards such as food, drugs, and sex. The brain encourages you to keep listening to music through the release of dopamine, so basically, your brain is telling you whether you should or should not listen to music at this moment.
How fascinating is it?
Reference
What Happens To Your Brain When You Listen To Music?
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